Chapter 15
Write Me Into a Monster
Elara
My arms have gone beyond pain into something else; stiff, heavy, foreign. When I try to move them, the ropes only breathe against my skin. The air down here has its own pulse: warm, mechanical, endless. Every sound is a machine exhaling. Every silence feels like him listening.
The lock turns. A pause. Then the door opens just wide enough for his shadow to spill across me.
I smell him before I feel him; metal, smoke, the faint tang of disinfectant. A different scent follows, soft and domestic: food.
He says my name once, testing whether I’m conscious. I nod even though the blindfold keeps him from seeing it.
“I’m going to untie you,” he says. His voice is low, even, the kind used to speak to frightened animals. “You’ll keep the blindfold on. I’ll leave the room. When you hear the bolt slide, you can take it off and eat. Do you understand?”
My throat is raw. “Yes.”
Then his hands are on me; gloved, deliberate. The ropes loosen. The numbness in my wrists breaks into needles of blood returning. I flinch when the last knot slips free. The mattress dips as he stands.
I hear him set something down; ceramic against concrete, the faint rattle of cutlery. Then his steps retreat, slow and unhurried. The door closes, a seal against the rest of the world, and the bolt slides home. Only when I’m sure he’s gone do I lift the blindfold.
Light cuts into me, thin and yellow, warm as breath.
I blink until shapes steady. The room isn’t what I imagined.
No chains, no rusted bars. Just a square of concrete softened by heat, a mattress with white sheets, and the tray he left beside it; steam curling from a bowl, the smell of broth and herbs.
There’s another space off to the side, an open alcove with a toilet and a sink no larger than my two hands.
No mirror. No window. Just pipes humming behind the wall like a second heartbeat.
The floor radiates warmth through my bare feet.
It should comfort me, but it feels like captivity disguised as care.
Hunger wins over pride. I crawl to the tray, dip the spoon, and taste. Salt and fat, simple, human. The warmth hurts going down, then steadies something inside me. He’s keeping me alive, not out of mercy but intention. I don’t know which is worse.
When I stand, my right foot protests. The bandages there are damp again, a red halo spreading through the cloth. I limp to the alcove, finish, wash my hands in cold water that smells faintly of iron.
Back on the mattress, I pull my knees to my chest and for a long while I stare at nothing.
The walls breathe warmth. Somewhere above, pipes knock softly like distant heartbeats.
I try to count them, to turn sound into time, but thought collapses halfway through.
I think of my mother’s kitchen, of the smell of sugar and smoke, of my father’s voice explaining how foxes are too curious for their own good.
Every choice I made since then seems to have led me here, to this room without windows.
I wanted truth, and I found a man who keeps it chained beneath the earth.
I keep counting the knots in the concrete to hold my thoughts still, but they keep sliding apart, drifting back to the same single point: I am below the world of the living, and he is the reason I’m breathing.
The lock turns.
I don’t move. The sound goes through me like a key through water.
The door opens only far enough for his presence to cross the threshold; cold air, the brief scent of outside on heavy fabric, and then he steps in, the mask back on, lenses dark.
The hiss of its filters folds into the room’s other mechanical sounds so neatly that for a heartbeat I can’t tell which one is him.
“Can I ask you a question?” I hear my voice before I feel my mouth shape it.
He doesn’t answer immediately. He walks back to whatever’s outside of my cell, then he drags a chair from behind him—metal legs whispering across concrete—and puts it opposite the mattress, outside the radius of my body’s flinch.
He sits, composed. Hands folded, legs spread.
The mask makes him look like someone carved breathing into a skull.
“Go on,” he says. The answer is neither invitation nor warning, simply a place to stand.
A black notebook arcs through the air and lands at my feet. My notebook. The pencil follows, a neat clatter on the ground. I recognize the crease on the cover’s corner, the one I worry with my thumb when I’m thinking.
Another breath slips out of me. “You took this.”
“I only collect evidence.”
I don’t know whether to flinch at that or be grateful. I pick up the notebook, the paper soft where it’s absorbed old rain, and slide the pencil under the elastic. The weight of it steadies something in me; habit, ritual, a spine I can pretend I still have.
“I’ve written about you since university,” I say. “Long before I was a journalist. I didn’t know your name. Just your pattern.”
“I don’t have a name,” he replies, head tilting the way it does when he’s choosing the exact right sentence. “Patterns are truer.”
“Everyone has a name.”
“Names are for the living.”
We let that hang. I realize I’m holding the notebook like a shield, the cardboard pressed to the spot where the stitches pull. I lower it, slowly, and try to sit a little straighter.
“Why the mask?” I ask. “It’s not just for prints or cameras. There aren’t any down here.”
“Sight is power.” His voice stays level, almost gentle.
He leans back. The chair sighs. “Was that all?”
His question hangs in the air like smoke. I should say yes. I should nod, fold the notebook closed, and keep breathing. Instead, I hear myself whisper, “No.”
Something in my chest twists, half fear, half confused. “You could’ve killed me.”
“I still can.” He leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees, gloved hands clasped loosely between them. “But you wanted to see what lives under the skin of monsters. I thought you should meet it.”
The air hums between us. I can hear the rhythm of his breath through the filters; slow, deliberate, almost calm.
I clutch the notebook tighter. “So this is punishment?”
He tilts his head just enough for the lamplight to catch on the black glass of his mask.
“Punishment?” he repeats, the word tasting wrong in his mouth. “No, Elara. You would know when I’d punish you, you wouldn’t question it.”
He stands; slowly, deliberately. The chair’s legs scrape against the concrete like a blade dragged across stone.
“You call it punishment because you still believe in guilt. You think there’s a moral scale weighing what I do.
But down here—” his voice lowers, the mask inches from my face now, the filtered breath ghosting my cheek, “—there’s no scale.
Only gravity. Everything falls the same way once it starts. ”
I can’t look away. The air between us feels wrong; thick, magnetic.
“Then what is this?” I whisper. “A lesson?”
“A correction,” he says. “You wrote me into the world with your words; turned me into something men whisper about over headlines and coffee. I’m only returning the favor.”
He circles the bed, each step slow, soundless, predatory. “Do you want to know the first rule of killing?”
My pulse stutters, a faint whimper escapes my lips.
He ignores it. “You look at them until you stop seeing a person. Until the eyes are only data: distance, depth, reflex. Once you stop seeing a soul, the body follows easily.” He pauses beside me.
I turn my head toward him, the words scraping out before I can swallow them back. “Is that what you see when you look at me?” My voice trembles, thin as glass.
The silence that follows is unbearable. Then he exhales through the mask—slow, deliberate—like he’s tasting the question.
Finally, he says, “You’re not a person, Elara. Not anymore.” The harshness in his tone makes it worse. “People belong to the world above us. They eat, sleep, fuck, lie, pretend they matter. You crossed that line the moment you started writing about me. The moment you wanted to understand.”
He steps closer, his presence bending the air, the heat of him a pulse that finds mine. “You wanted to know what lives under the skin of monsters,” he murmurs. “Now you will. And what does that make you?”
I shake my head, but he keeps talking, voice low, steady. “You’re not prey. Prey doesn’t look back. You’re the question that couldn’t stop asking itself. A wound that wanted to study its own infection.”
His gloved hand lifts, tracing my jaw, close enough that the air trembles between us. A silent tear falls down my cheek. “I could kill you,” he says, almost thoughtfully. “It would be easy. Clean. But then you’d never finish the story, and I’m not sure I can stand to lose that.”
My breath hitches. “Lose what?”
He moves away from me. “The way you make me remember I still have a pulse.”
The words fall like a confession and a threat in one. Then his tone hardens, turning the air sharp again. “Don’t mistake that for mercy. Curiosity is the thing that trapped you, but also the only thing keeping you alive.”
He turns towards the door, dragging the chair behind him.
“So write,” he says finally, his voice the soft edge of a blade. “Write about me. Make me the monster that fits the story. If your words stop moving me, if I ever read them and feel nothing, then I’ll finish what I started.”